Bitcoin Forum

I am new to Bitmining, so i am still getting accustomed to the ins and outs of mining.

But, i accidently was using an old BitCoin Adress. NOT for ALOT, but i did have about .10-.20 bitcoins sent over.

Is there anyway to "re-direct" those coins to the real owner? Me... or just chuck it up as a newbie mistake?

Thanks everyone!

PS First post, trying to remove my newbie restriction! lol

If you don't have the wallet file for that address then they are as good as gone.

Better doing this mistake now than when you transfer 100+ bitcoins. :)

If there was a way to send bitcoin somewhere, and then later change where it goes it wouldn't be a very good currency.  Imagine if I could send you some bitcoin as payment for something, and then after receiving my purchase I "re-direct" those coins back into my own wallet.

That being said, if you can find an old backup of the wallet that has the "old Bitcoin Address" or if you wrote down the private key of that address somewhere, then you could access the bitcoins that are associated with that address and send them back. Otherwise, you can "chuck it up as a newbie mistake".  Without access to the wallet.dat file or the private key of the address, the coins are as gone as if you tossed a $1 bill into a campfire.

Edit: There is a small possibility that some day in the distant future a weakness could be discovered in ECDSA with a Secp256k1 curve.  If that should happen, (and you have ever sent any bitcoins from that address in the past) then it is possible that the bitcoins currently at that address could become recoverable with some effort.  It is also possible that bitcoin could become popular enough for 0.20 BTC to become quite valuable someday.  Perhaps it would be worth at least keeping track of the address and quantity of bitcoin in case recovery should become possible someday.

Thanks for the reply everyone.

Not too bad since it was such a small amount of BTC, and like you said its better to have done the "newbie mistake" rather then sending a bunch of coins somewhere.

Thanks for the help guys.

What does "old Bitcoin Address" mean to you? 

Bitcoin addresses don't expire.  Nearly every hosted (shared) EWallet service which gives you a deposit address will credit subsequent deposits to your account once the transaction confirms, so if you were using an EWallet you should see those coins.  If you were using a client such as Bitcoin-Qt or Blockchain.info/wallet, then you those addresses can continue to be used.

About the only time an "old address" is truly an "old address" is if you didn't back up a wallet and lost the ability to access it or were using a hosted (shared) EWallet that you no longer have access to.   This happens pretty regularly with "low security" wallets (e.g., Instawallet, EasyWallet.org) where knowing the URL is the only way to access the wallet and people don't write it down or backup that URL somewhere.